5 things you might not know about Nick Helm

The former 'dinner lady' and 2011 Best Joke of the Fringe winner doesn't get on with Alice Cooper

1 Among Nick Helm’s pre-showbiz jobs have been as a ‘dinner lady’ at a secondary school for boys, counting traffic and working in the café of a garden centre.

2 In 2001, he formed a theatre company called Bad Ash Productions whose oeuvre includes I Think, You Stink!, a 45-minute musical B-movie tribute show and a play called Stroke. Helm has ambitions to develop those further.

3 Never meet your heroes they say. And Helm would probably agree having encountered Alice Cooper three times, none to any satisfactory degree. The most disappointing came when Helm worked at the Classic Rock Awards and the Rock’n’Roll Call of Honour event. Helm brought Cooper a can of Diet Coke and Tim Rice two glasses of champagne. To Helm’s chagrin, Rice was very gracious while Cooper didn’t even break conversation to take the drink.

4 The muse strikes in many different ways. During one interview, Helm was asked what got his funny juices flowing: ‘A pint, a minute’s silence and a little stretch’.

5 At last year’s Fringe, Helm scooped the Dave Best Joke of the Fringe Award for this: ‘I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’. Before that, perhaps his biggest claim to fame was being picked 98 in a glossy mag’s 100 Best Things of the Month feature. When you consider the context of him being one of only six humans in the list (manbags, cheese and a lake rated higher), it’s not as humble a feat as it first sounds.